Using R to download zipped data file, extract, and import data

Question

@EZGraphs on Twitter writes: \"Lots of online csvs are zipped. Is there a way to download, unzip the archive, and load the data to a data.frame using R? #Rstats\"

I

Answer 1

For Mac (and I assume Linux)...

If the zip archive contains a single file, you can use the bash command funzip, in conjuction with fread from the data.table package:

library(data.table)
dt <- fread("curl http://www.newcl.org/data/zipfiles/a1.zip | funzip")

In cases where the archive contains multiple files, you can use tar instead to extract a specific file to stdout:

dt <- fread("curl http://www.newcl.org/data/zipfiles/a1.zip | tar -xf- --to-stdout *a1.dat")